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Alibaba launches open source Qwen3 model that surpasses OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1


Qwen3’s open-weight release under an accessible license marks an important milestone, lowering barriers for developers and organizations.

With Qwen3, users can engage the more intensive “Thinking Mode” using the button marked as such on the Qwen Chat website or by embedding specific prompts like/think or/no_think when deploying the model locally or through the API, allowing for flexible use depending on the task complexity. Junyang Lin, a member of the Qwen team, commented on X that building Qwen3 involved addressing critical but less glamorous technical challenges such as scaling reinforcement learning stably, balancing multi-domain data, and expanding multilingual performance without quality sacrifice. Yet at the same time, it also offers a viable alternative to other Chinese players including DeepSeek, Tencent, and ByteDance — as well as the myriad and growing number of North American models such as the aforementioned OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Amazon, Meta and others.

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